Face-to-face advice is still the key to success in international financial services for advisers despite rise of technology and the greater use of online meeting tools in the post-pandemic landscape, according to a survey undertaken by RL360 and International Investment.

According to the RL360 sponsored global technology survey, which was conducted across International Investment

readers between April and May 2022, nothing beats face-to-face advice, with more than two thirds of respondents (68%) responding 'no' when asked 'are virtual meetings just as effective as face-to-face meetings?'

Just 29.6% of advisers said that they felt that online meetings such as on Teams and Zoom were 'just as effective' and only 1.9% said that this medium was 'better'.

However, despite the preference for face-to-face meetings, only 20.8% disagreed that 'in the post-pandemic business environment, the majority of interactions with clients will be digital'. Almost half (49.1%) agreed, though

about a third (30.2%) believed that the size of the investment made a key difference to the answer.

Zoom boom

Of those using technology, Zoom proved to be the most popular with a huge 92.3% of respondents said that

they used it, with Teams (69.2%) and WhatsApp (65.4%) the next most popular applications or websites used.

Online document signing technology is also being used by many advisers and their clients with Docusign (55.8%) and Adobe Sign (44.2%) the most popular. 

Age profile

Of advisers that respond ended to the question 'is the profile/age range of your client base changing?', more than half (51%), said that there was no change but of those that

said there was a change in age profile - 29.6% said they were dealing with older clients and just 18.5% saying they were younger.

Word of mouth

When it came to the main prospecting methods that advisers used for client generation, as the graph below attests, word of mouth referral (75.9%) is still the biggest way to generate new prospects.

Other methods such ad marketing campaigns (35.2%) and face-to-face presentations (35.2%) were also popular and are locked in second place in this survey.

Other areas such as social media use, events/sponsorship and personal involvement in their communities were also popular methods for prospects.